Chapter 16
Did You Ever Feel Like That?
I should have been celebrating, since I’d passed my driver’s test, but instead, I’m in the middle of my room hyperventilating. I open my eyes. I look at the wall, full of tracings that don’t make sense to anyone else, and see the last words I’ve added.
A lighthouse in the middle of a storm.
Dad said those words in the burger place, and I haven’t gotten them out of my mind since.
That’s what love should be like: love, security, certainty.
But what happens when the bulb breaks or the sea grows wild—do you abandon the lighthouse before the walls cave in, the floor gives way, and the ocean swallows everything?
I listen to Mom and Dad arguing in the dining room.
When I can’t take it anymore, I go downstairs and interrupt them. Scene change: The daughter who’s still there steps in. My mother’s despair is intense, but that means she must still be capable of feeling something, that the woman she used to be isn’t gone entirely.
“Does she know?” she asks loudly. “Did you tell Greta you want to get rid of all Lucy’s clothes? How can you even propose such a thing?”
My father remains calm next to the wooden shelf in the living room, but I can tell he’s nervous by the way he keeps opening and closing his right hand.
“Yeah, he told me,” I respond.
“And you didn’t tell him that was a stupid idea?”
“Mom, honestly—”
“She offered to lend me a hand. We’ll decide on some things to donate to charity, and the rest we’ll box up in the attic.”
Her eyes are glassy as she looks at us. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do, Rosie. Someone could… Someone could use these things.” Dad’s voice cracks, but she’s so focused on her own pain that she doesn’t even notice. “And we need to move on. We need to go back to—”
“Don’t you say another word, Jacob.”
She barges out of the room without looking back.
I feel myself shrinking when Dad and I are there alone, like a punctured helium balloon falling downward and getting trapped in the branches of some tree.
“I told you it wouldn’t be easy.”
“Why didn’t you tell her?”
“About Lucy’s game?” He shakes his head. “That would destroy her. Besides, I think that’s up to you.”
We go to my sister’s room that afternoon.
The door has been closed for six months, or longer actually—since she was still in the hospital dying.
We see a bed with a pink comforter with yellow flowers, dolls and stuffed animals on the shelves waiting sadly for their owner to return, a neat, ordered desk with a jar full of colorful pens ready for Lucy to use them again, and piles of the romance novels she liked so much.
I turn around, baffled. “I don’t know where to start.”
“The closet. That’s what she said, right? Donate the clothes.” Dad strides over and throws open the two doors.
The boxes we brought down from the attic slowly fill with Lucy’s clothes.
It’s indescribable, the feeling of grabbing each dress and pulling it off the hanger.
It’s like evicting someone from their home every time you fold one up and say goodbye.
Many of the garments call up memories. Lucy eating an ice cream that dripped and dripped until she had a strawberry trail on her blue sweatshirt.
Lucy turning circles in a flounced skirt.
Lucy jumping over puddles with me in her rubber boots.
Lucy choosing a burgundy chiffon dress to wear to prom with her best friend.
Lucy and her passion for the craziest, most outlandish shoes.
Lucy, Lucy, Lucy…
“You think we’re doing the right thing?”
“I don’t know,” Dad said. “But since neither of us knows the answer, we’ll just follow Lucy’s instructions.”
He stuffs a reddish wool sweater into a bag. The sleeves are wine red, but the color lightens on the torso to a faded pink toward the bottom. That’s what my sister’s aura was like: passionate, sweet, determined.
I gave that to her three birthdays back.
“Don’t throw that out,” I tell Dad. “Give it to me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
I bring the sweater to my nose and smell the softener. Then I rub it against my cheek. It’s soft. Soft like Lucy’s voice when I used to get into her bed and we’d talk in whispers until the sun came up.
I have a knot in my throat.
“You all right, Greta?”
“No.”
“Take a break.”
I get up with the sweater in my hands and walk over to the window, looking out at the street where we grew up.
I turn around a few times to watch Dad carefully putting away the garments.
He’s delicate—he checks all the seams, smooths out the wrinkles, folds them as if they were destined for a fashion show.
He’s so lost in thought, I don’t even think he knows I’m here until he gets up to look for tape in the desk.
“Third drawer,” I tell him.
Lucy was orderly to an extreme, methodical and precise, the kind of person who could make up a game like the Map of Longing.
My drawers are a mess, jam-packed with so much stuff it was impossible to find anything, unlike hers, which I know perfectly: notebooks in the first drawer, drawing materials in the second, and in the third, glue, tape, scissors, paper clips, and thumbtacks.
When my father finds what he’s looking for, he takes a look around, maybe asking himself how he’ll find the courage to get rid of the rest of it when the time comes, because there’s nothing there that doesn’t contain a little bit of Lucy.
“Now what?” I ask.
“We’ll leave the boxes here. That way we can give your mother some time to accept it. What do you think?”
“Sure.”
“Good.”
“Thanks, Dad. For this.”
“Don’t mention it.” He rests a hand on my shoulder and looks me in the eyes. “If I ever show up in that game Lucy gave you, you’ll tell me, right? Because I’d like to know…if she wanted anything from me. We didn’t talk much in those last days, before she…”
“I’ll tell you. Don’t worry.”
He still has that air of defeat around him, the one that’s been there for what seems like forever now. I can hardly remember what he was like before, when he used to joke and make the three of us laugh with his natural charm. I watch him go down the stairs until he disappears.
That evening, a few hours before getting rid of those material traces of Lucy in the world, I find myself on the porch of a house with a yard.
Summer’s begun, and the temperature’s mild.
I don’t know most of the people here, but Taylor’s next to me, and now and then he strokes my right cheek and fills the cup in my hand.
Some friends of his have gotten together to watch a supposedly important boxing match.
At the end, more people show up. By nighttime, nobody even remembers why we’re there.
Not that I care. I wasn’t planning on going out, but when I was sitting in my little refuge in the window, thinking nonstop, and got a message from Taylor offering to come pick me up, I said yeah because I thought I could turn my mind off for once.
Have you ever wanted to do that—just put your brain on ice for a while?
Get some calm before you pick up the thread of whatever it is you have inside you?
I get tired of myself sometimes. I get tired of my mind.
I get tired of thinking things over and living in an endless labyrinth of tangled-up ideas that I don’t know how to emerge from.
“That guy’s crazy.” Mia points to someone with a beer trying to outdrink his friend without drawing a breath. He’s winning by a long shot.
“Both of them are,” says Sebastian, and I look away to try and keep myself from vomiting. Of all the people at this party, he’s the one I hate the most.
The people around the guys drinking cheer and record them.
So bored I’m almost in a trance, I take out my phone and look to see if I’ve got any notifications.
Really, what I want is a message or a missed call from Will.
It’s been an eternity since I heard from him, and I haven’t seen him since we went to that abandoned farm.
That feels like decades ago, even if it’s only been two weeks.
When I wrote him to tell him I’d passed my driving test, he just answered with an impersonal Congrats, Greta.
This isn’t the place for it, and I don’t like being the one to break first, but I can’t help it, my fingers rise and fall on the keyboard as the noise around me gets louder.
I think about Lucy’s clothes in the boxes and how far away I feel from everything around me, and the solitude is suddenly so deep I can’t reach the bottom.
Greta: Did you ever feel like you were on fire in a room full of people and everybody was just off in their own world and didn’t even know you existed?
The response arrives two or three minutes later.
Will: No.
I take another drink and close my eyes.
My phone vibrates.
Will: But I have felt like I was on fire in the middle of a room full of people pointing at me and watching me burn to ashes.
Relieved, I exhale. I don’t respond. I don’t want to do anything to ruin this moment of perfect mutual understanding. I don’t want to touch anything because what if I break it? But I feel a warmth in my chest, a small match catching fire.
“You want a smoke?” Taylor asks.
“No.” I put my phone away.
He looks at me askance before lighting his own and blowing the smoke upward into the air. He bends down and his lips touch my ears before he whispers, “You think this party’s boring?”
Sincerity just doesn’t work for some people. So I try something else. “Do you care?”
“Of course. You’re my girl, aren’t you?”
“Okay, that’s new.”
“That’s what you really want, though, right?” He rubs my earlobe with his thumb and edges in closer. “Well, let’s make it a reality. Greta and Taylor, homecoming king and queen.”
“You are aware high school ended a long time ago,” I respond.
“Why do you have to always ruin the moment?” Taylor asks.